Sayed Kashua - Dancing Arabs

I tell him I know, I understand, and I swear I haven’t said anything to anyone. I’ve never talked about it.

He believes me again and drops the subject.

And then I remember how on my last visit home on ‘id eladha he yelled at me. “You lunatic!” he screamed. “You certified lunatic!” All this because I didn’t want to pay the usual visit to my aunts. I can still feel my left cheek burning, as if the slap happened just now. I shake my head and put my cheek against the car window to relieve the pain.

I remember the day when Naomi leaned her head against my shoulder for the first time. It was before she told me she loved me, before we started going together. It’s hard to reconstruct that feeling. You can remember it, but you can’t re-feel it.

Last week, I put my head against her chest, and she ran her fingers through my hair and said, “We shouldn’t get too attached, you know. Do you understand? We shouldn’t. Enough. We’re breaking up, and that’s that. Otherwise, Mother will throw me out of the house.” She told me her mother had said she’d rather have a lesbian for a daughter than one who hangs out with Arabs.

Suddenly I realize I haven’t a clue as to what I’m going to do about the math final, and I’d dropped out of the physics exam too at the last minute. After three years of torture in physics classes, I didn’t make it to the exam. Now it hits me: I’m going to flunk. I’m not sure I’ll even get my matriculation certificate. My parents will freak out. My father will never get over the shame. He’s right, my father. I’ve ruined my future, and it’s all because of the Jewish whore.

But I’m not mad at her, not at all. It’s entirely her mother’s fault. What could Naomi do about it anyway? If it had been up to her, she wouldn’t have broken up with me like that, because how can you stop loving someone overnight, to keep a deadline that was set eighteen months earlier? I had been expecting it the whole time, dreading it.

How I screamed yesterday! What a racket I made! I tried to run away from the emergency room, but the guidance counselor was strong enough to grab me by the arms. When I tried to break loose, I fell to the floor. She kept clutching me by my clothing and whispering, “You’re not a child. Stop screaming. Look what you’re doing.” I remember lots of people just stood around and stared at us, and the guard came but didn’t do anything, just stood to the side and watched me cry and scream. When my parents and Bassem arrived, I stopped at once.

The last thing I heard was what my father said to his friend about the Jewish whore. How I hated him then. And I hated the guidance counselor even more. She wanted me to stop loving Naomi, or at least try to love Salwa, an Arab girl at school. She was pretty and smart, that’s what the counselor kept telling me. So there I was, on my way back to Jerusalem with my parents. They’d gotten a call from my school, asking them to come with me. I wouldn’t be allowed back in school unless my parents and I met with a psychologist first. There wasn’t much time left — just one more day and one more matriculation exam — but the counselor said they couldn’t assume responsibility for me without the psychologist’s approval.

The psychologist said I was okay, I hadn’t really wanted to die, and the pills I took wouldn’t have hurt me. He believed me when I said I’d read in a book on pharmaceuticals that you need to take as much as 300 milligrams for it to work. He said the information was correct and he was inclined to believe that it wasn’t a suicide attempt. He wanted me to have the pills, but he’d give them to the guidance counselor, and she’d give me one a day, because I was still depressed, and it was a psychiatric prescription, after all.

I have to get back to school. There’s only one day left.

We didn’t talk on the way back to school. We got in the car, same as before. My father fiddled with the dial, looking for the music channel, and swore at Jerusalem for having such lousy reception. He stopped at a steak house for a hummus and a beer. Mother ordered chicken. I didn’t want anything. All I wanted was to get back there, so I could see Naomi. I didn’t have time to spare. My father looked at me and said, “This is too good for you.”

I’m walking up the hill that stretches between our house and the mosque, keeping my eyes to the ground, hoping the neighbors passing by have forgotten me by now. Maybe I’ve changed, and they won’t recognize me anymore. I don’t exchange the usual salaam aleikum s. I shift my side pack from arm to arm. It’s heavy, and the trek up toward the taxi station is hard going. Normally Father would drive me there. Sometimes he’d take me as far as Kfar Sava, and the first few times, even to Jerusalem. But Father isn’t home now. He’s in the hospital.

When Mother got home, I woke up. She explained that Father hadn’t felt well the night before, and even though they didn’t find anything, they decided to keep him at the hospital for observation. She said there was nothing wrong with him and he’d be discharged soon. If she hadn’t needed to get to work by eight, she would have stayed there till they sent him home. She suggested I stop at the hospital to see him on my way to Jerusalem. I had to go through Kfar Sava anyway to catch the bus. “Sit with him for five minutes,” she said. She was always trying to mediate between Father and me, to improve our relationship.

Six months had gone by since I’d finished school, six months since my last visit home. Father had tried hard to be nonchalant at first, as if he didn’t really care what was happening with me, as if I could go to hell for all he cared. But when he recalled how I’d disgraced him, he’d go berserk and start shouting. “You, our greatest hope, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Everyone in the village keeps asking me how far you’ve gone. What am I supposed to tell them, that you haven’t even taken your finals?” All the other parents are celebrating their kids’ acceptance into medical school or law or engineering, and my father has to tell people that the Jews haven’t decided yet what to do with my brain. He’s told everyone they’re afraid another country will kidnap me and use my talents.

I don’t have a place of my own in the house anymore. My older brother has put our two beds together to make a queen-size. Whenever I used to come home, Mother would separate the beds and make mine up. But this time she didn’t, and they didn’t clear any space for me in the closet either. I left my clothes in my side pack and slept in Grandma’s room. On a mattress, not in her bed. In the morning, I took my bag and headed for Jerusalem to look for a job. At night, I plan to crash at Adel’s. He’s in law school already, and he has a room in the dorms.

* * *

Mother called four days ago and said my cousin had been killed. “You’ve got to come home for the funeral and the three days of mourning.” She said he’d been playing ball with a few classmates, and it got on the nerves of their crazy drug-addict neighbors. The ball went over the fence and landed in the druggies’ house. The three brothers stormed out with knives and stabbed the kids. Ali was the only one who died. The other kids were injured, but they’re okay. My mother said Ali’s father was stabbed in the chest when he tried to protect the kids. He was in bad shape, but he’d been operated on, and he’d be all right. They hadn’t told him yet. They pretended Ali was okay and had been sent to a different hospital. The doctors said it would be dangerous to give him the news of his son’s death at that point. My parents went to visit him in the hospital yesterday. While they were there, at my uncle’s bedside, my father complained of chest pains. The doctors decided to do some tests. The tests were okay. Mother says it’s just fatigue.